Thanks Alo, this is interesting to see. Vegas 19 now has a similar "color keys" function if you have a numberpad with the color grading panel, or you can enter in values manually under offset. Wish we had an eyedropper to check particular values as he does in Resolve.

I think getting exposure/contrast in a reasonable place to start then fixing white balance then adding back in contrast to suit the image and doing selective color corrections is a fine workflow. I've generally done the first two steps in RGB curves as that's what I'm used to from the photo world.

Conventional photographic wisdom, beginning even before Adams, suggests a strong case for working from the ground up with transmission media. That way I don't have to go back-and-forth, back-and-forth, as was done dozens of times in his perplexing workflow. Does he by chance make his sample footage available?

This discussion really belongs in the OT place.

The whole beginning was what not to do.

Eek! I gave it away after about 5 minutes. It says its aimed at beginners but its anything but. Nonetheless, it is a good lesson on how to complicate color grading - IMO.

I suspect that you might know @Musicvid , but in my time in the advertising and film industry in the 70s +, I never worked how sending off the work print and cut neg to the 'lab' ended up with a color corrected answer print. With film whether it be Kodak or Fuji, I'd love to know how was that color correction done particularly when at the time there was no analogue or digital monitor involved? And yes, there would have been instructions from the editor and director about the desired look - but how did the lab color grade that look when creating the internegative from the original negative? I feel really dumb asking this, but I've never worked it out.

Just to clarify, I'm referring to 16mm and 35 mm footage. Even in the 70s, color grading of video footage was fairly straight forward - even 16/35 mm film via telecine transfers.

@Dexcon The tutorial actually starts at 7 minutes- did you get to that point?

The first 5 minutes of going back and forth with the 3 way color corrector is what he says not to do as it introduces non-linear color casts.

The steps here are
1. exposure and contrast (Increase offset luminance / curves to get midtones in right place while leaving headroom for highlights and shadows)
2. Offset (printer lights) to set white balance
3. More contrast based on needs of image
4. Selective color correction as needed

I've seen 30 sec ads with mega complex node structure for color grade.

I suspect that you might know @Musicvid , but in my time in the advertising and film industry in the 70s +, I never worked how sending off the work print and cut neg to the 'lab' ended up with a color corrected answer print. With film whether it be Kodak or Fuji, I'd love to know how was that color correction done particularly when at the time there was no analogue or digital monitor involved? And yes, there would have been instructions from the editor and director about the desired look - but how did the lab color grade that look when creating the internegative from the original negative? I feel really dumb asking this, but I've never worked it out.

@ Dexcon, you are correct, we didn't have VCNAs (analog Video Color Negative Analyzers) until the late 1970s.

Custom prints were done with conventional enlargers with dichroic filters in the light head, and corrections were eyeballed; we made contact film masks where contrast or gamma needed to be altered.

We rarely got a print match on the first try; usually involved one or more test prints and hand correction using the same decimal log scale Vegas uses today, or military-style percentages, which are very confusing.

Here's the tl;dr

From the 50s through 70s, the production workhorse was the venerable Kodak S Series pictured. The top cabinet was loaded with color paper rolls, 5"-11" in width. From the bottom up, there was a halogen bulb (initially very expensive), a light condenser box (polished metal), three fragile CMY dichroic glass filter paddles ( they couldn't be cleaned, and were $300 ea.), which snapped into the light path with high voltage solenoids powered by a capacitor-powered comparator circuit, which received its trigger voltage from RGB photomultiplier tubes in the lens housing. The lenses and negative gates were interchangeable with a full range of sizes from 2-1/4 x 3-1/4" (6x9) all the way down through 35mm to 110 (roughly 16mm).

The operator would view the negative through the gate and classify the scene based on zone contrast and keying, not exposure. A backlight beach or snow scene might get a -3 button, while a flash shot at night or fireworks would get a +3 to +10 (the 7-button exposure decade box was additive), also there were 6 buttons for each color pair: R/C, G/M, and B/Y. These were mostly used to override the PMTs when someone was wearing a red shirt, for instance, to keep the print from being too cyan.

Later came the Kodak 2635 printer with automatic film transport and negative classification, the Gretag, the first microprocessor-controlled operator console, and of course the Hazeltine cine film printer, after which the "color lights" in daVinci are badly modeled.

Thanks for the opportunity to share photofinishing trivia.

A comparison with a conventional 3-point correction in Vegas using Levels and WB. 10 minutes..

At the risk of sounding like a looped recording:

1. Black Point
2. White Point
3. Input Levels
4. Neutral Midtone Balance
5. p-break
6. Gamma
7. beer

As a side note: I can find no reference to a "Waqas Qazi" or "Qazi" on any of the production staff pages for Joker (2019). Doesn't mean he didn't work on it, he just wasn't listed. Here's Qazi's website: https://bit.ly/2YWMXb9

@RogerS ..

The tutorial actually starts at 7 minutes- did you get to that point? 

No, but I did trick myself because I had skipped the intro clearly missing the bit explaining up front that the first secttion was 'how not to do it'. Having now watched it in its entirety, the pro way of color grading from 7 mins in was very interesting, helpful and worthwhile - so thank you for nudging me back to it. The use in Resolve of zooming the preview window to help better make grading decisions only amplifies for me the need for Vegas Pro's preview window to have an equally easy zoom function - as has been requested by many users many times on the forum over the years.

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@Musicvid  ... thank you so very much for taking the time to provide such a detailed explanation of the color grading process from the days of film - it is very much appreciated.

I didn't know what to expect but, wow, never would I have imagined these processes. I am truly in awe of the color graders of the film era.

Cheers, even if it's not 100% useful for Vegas there are things of value to be had. I wish Vegas had preview window zoom and love how the droppers show up in scopes in Resolve.

Wish we had an eyedropper to check particular values as he does in Resolve.

@RogerS Sorry, we still can't give you Video Preview zoom at this point, but you do have two color samplers in the Color Grading panel that you can use to check your values. Look at the Specify a Black Point and Specify a White Point tools in the Lift and Gain controls respectively. Click one of those and point to an object in your video. The button for the tool turns into a color square and the color values are updated in the R, G, and B fields. If you don't want to actually sample the object, press the Esc key once you've noted your color values.